Thus that able engineer who had built the great power dam here at the Two Forks--a man who had built a half score of railroads and laid piers for bridges without number, and planned city monuments, with the boldest and most fertile of imaginations, Friedrich Waldhorn his name, was a graduate of our best institutions and those of Germany--long since had been watched as closely as many another of less importance in charge of work remotely or intimately concerned with the country's public resources.
Waldhorn--before the war an outspoken Socialist and free-thinker--may have known that he was watched--must have known it when a young medical officer given military duties quite outside his own profession, was put over him in authority at the scene of his engineering triumph, and at precisely the time of its climax.

But the situation for Waldhorn was this, that if he resigned and left the place he would only come the more closely under immediate espionage.

Whatever his motives, he remained, sullen and uncommunicative.
Meanwhile the little camp sprawled in the sun, scattered along the plateau on the side of the mountain gorge.

Crude, unpainted, built of logs or raw boards, it lay in the shadow for the greater part of the day, deep down in the narrow cleft of the mountains, far out in the wilderness.

The great forest deepened and thickened, back of it, forty miles into the high country.
Those who lived here in the canyon could not as yet understand the nature of the thin blue veil which today obscured their scanty sunlight, did not know that each minute of day was destroying trees which had cost a thousand years to grow, which never in the knowledge of man might be replaced.